"The rich" are one of the few groups we're supposed to hate. Unfortunately, among the so-called rich we have vanishingly few people capable of launching a full-throated defense of themselves against ignorant criticisms. Most are pathetically apologetic, desperately hoping to be loved. Boo. Stand up for yourselves!

Professor Michael Rectenwald, the former Marxist who will deliver the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at the Mises Institute's Austrian Economics Research Conference this year, returns for a sneak preview of what he plans to say there about postmodernism, authoritarianism, and "social justice." We also discuss media gullibility, why corporations seem to be jumping on board the SJW bandwagon, and a lot more.

Both times I've surveyed my listeners, Michael Malice has been chosen as their favorite guest on the Tom Woods Show. Here I try to uncover what makes him tick. That takes us back to his birth in the Soviet Union, his move to the United States, his experiences in school, his exposure to Ayn Rand, the development of his ideas, and a lot more. Plus, I ask him the question he most likes to ask others.

When you read old -- and I mean old, like nineteenth century old -- American writers on money and banking, something jumps out at you: they understood things with a surprising clarity, and had a proto-Austrian conception of why the economy experienced boom-bust cycles. Suddenly it feels less lonely to believe that artificial credit creation leads to a boom that has to end in a bust. In this episode, therefore, I share some unknown American intellectual history.

Stephen Presser and I go from William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England played such a central role in influencing early American ideas about the law, all the way to the Marxist-inspired Critical Legal Studies movement, the feminist legal critique, and back again to the originalism movement.

How many times has this crisis been chalked up to "greed"? As if people hadn't been greedy three weeks earlier. It's time our amateur moralizers learned a little something, and that's the purpose of this episode. My thanks to the Acton Institute, where I delivered these remarks.

Cliff Maloney, president of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) -- an organization I have enthusiastically supported for over ten years -- joins me to discuss their strategy for the campuses and society at large. YAL developed out of Students for Ron Paul, and are on the front lines of getting our message to young people who might otherwise never hear a dissenting voice.

Ben Lewis and I go back into conservative/libertarian history to discuss the work of Frank Meyer, who thought the conservative and libertarian positions were not so difficult to reconcile. Conservative stalwart Russell Kirk wasn't buying it, and the two feuded vigorously. Murray Rothbard, too, weighed in on the controversy.

Friends and foes of the market alike refer to capitalism as a system of "competition." Is that really its characteristic feature, and is that what distinguishes it from other systems? This is actually a misunderstanding, and one that probably turns plenty of people off to the market. What's the right way to think about and explain it? That's what Antony Sammeroff and I discuss in this episode.

In this episode I explore the history of the idea that society can more or less run itself, that there are certain observable regularities in our relationships with one another, particularly in commerce, that cannot be interfered with without negative consequences, and do not actually need to be interfered with in the first place.